As the rich get richer, exotic carmakers are winning

Bloomberg

The steering wheel may be slowly going out of style, but no one seems to have told the Ferrari set.
Purchases in this rarified strata of the auto industry are accelerating far more quickly than those of the pedestrian cars and crossovers catering to the Costco crowd. Now, it’s poised to shift into an even higher sales gear.
Over the past five years, the five brands that sell their cars for $200,000 and up—Bentley Motors Ltd., Ferrari NV, Automobili Lamborghini Spa, McLaren Automotive, and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars—have collectively managed a 51 percent increase in the annual number of machines sold. Last year, 30,000 of these exotic beasts roared out of dealerships.
So much for scarcity. During the same period, the global auto market as a whole failed to keep pace, growing
by just 23 percent, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
“I like to keep one from each brand,” said Anthony Tonokaboni, a disposable-glove magnate and self-professed car nut. At the moment, the Los Angeles executive has a 2012 Ferrari 458, a McLaren 650S Le Mans, and, on order, a Porsche GT3. Tonokaboni borrows his business partner’s Bentley on occasion and, in the next year or two, intends to buy a McLaren 720, which starts around $290,000.
Indeed, much of the recent growth at the socioeconomic peak of the car world has come from McLaren, which has gone from a boutique skunkworks hammering together a few hundred cars in 2011 to a polished manufacturer on par with the most bourgeois Italian brands.
Jolyon Nash, the company’s executive director of global sales and marketing, said the “right number” for the brand is from 4,500 to 5,000 vehicles a year. Customers are taking to the British whips because they are more comfortable and pragmatic than they look. “We find McLaren customers want a car that is the best of both worlds—which is to say a car they can drive to the grocery store in, but then take to the track on weekends,” Nash explained.
Mike Ward has long sold cars from Maserati Spa and Nissan Motor Co’s Infiniti at his Denver dealership. Six months ago, he added McLaren to the lot and is on pace to sell at least 40 of them annually. “To be honest, there was a little pent-up demand,” he explained. Most of the buyers are in town, but Ward said some are coming from Wyoming and Kansas. “At the moment, there’s plenty of money here, and people like sports cars,” he said.
Elsewhere in the pack, both Ferrari and Lamborghini have goosed the pedal a bit on production. As Volkswagen was slogging through its diesel scandal, it quietly more than doubled the number of Lamborghinis coming out of its factory near Bologna. Meanwhile, Ferrari blew by its self-imposed cap of 7,000 vehicles, in part to appease investors since its initial public offering back in October 2015.
Underlying this luxury product push are some very cushy economics. The world simply has far more rich people than it did five years ago. Thanks to a bullish stock market, there are now 226,450 or so “ultra high net worth individuals”—those with assets of more than $30 million. Those ranks have swelled by 21 percent since 2012, according to Wealth-X.